Tufoen,Tøyenparken
Park and nature reserve, Oslo
See location here: Coordinates 59°55'14.7"N 10°46'44.4"E
Tøyenparken is a park in the middle of Oslo city. It used to be farmland and still has a hay meadow, with a unique ecology linked to it disappearing in Norway as the grass is no longer cut with a scythe. There are trees connected to the Botanical Garden next to it. Therefore the tiny forest presents a multitude of tree species. Tøyenparken is a place where people often party in the summer. Every summer, there are music festivals, it offers a swimming pool, a kindergarten, and is part of Tøyen, the most densely populated and multicultural part of Oslo.
Googling the park, I came across the name Tufoen which I haven't heard of before or seen and then found an image in Google. It is a platform made with the local school children inside the tiny forest to sit on and reflect, a place that is theirs. I am curious to investigate this spot that came up by chance, although I might also end up in a different spot.
I chose the park because I am making a site-sensitive geo-locative soundwalk that opens in August in Tøyenparken. I have already worked there in 2018, mapping the whole area with a biologist, a zoologist and a plant researcher and researching the history of the place. It ended in a soundwalk presented in 2018 at the local library that I am now expanding on to include human voices and stories, as the first one focused on the non-human entities that have lived, live, and might live there in the future. I have spent a lot of time in the area. I also lived there before for a year in 2007, but for the soundwalk in 2018, I spent my time there primarily by day, and never for such extended periods in one place, and I am eager to see how my relationship with Tøyen might expand.
Útesita
My full moon night was a mix of kind of scary and magic.
For my Ùtesita, I was sitting at Tufoen, a place that popped up when I was googling Tøyenparken. The reason for choosing Tøyen and Tøyenparken as my spot was that I am making a site-sensitive sound walk in this area, and I hoped the Ùtesita would bring me even closer to these surroundings, which I have researched extensively over the past three years.
Tufoen came up on a google map search of the area: a place with small wooden logs put together by architects and a local children school to create a platform where you could lie and look up at the dense foliage covering this particular little hill of the park. The tiny hill contains a multitude of tree species and has been left primarily alone because of its unfeasibility for growing both food and for building. Therefore, there is a diverse ecology here.
I hadn't been at Tufoen before my Ùtesita night, and I arrived there at around 22. I had to do some searching, as it was pretty well-hidden. I was surprised I had not seen it before, having spent so much time in the park. There was much noise from the city, and all the time, people were walking on paths both below and above me, often peering towards me to see what this strange person was doing sitting entirely still. At first, it didn't bother me, but as it grew later, someone was staring at me for a really long period and then disappeared, which made me very uneasy. I remembered the recommendation of doing the Ùtesita away from people and confirmed again to myself that that made sense, as the human presence and my fear of what it could entail was interfering with my ability to let go.
However, at some point, perhaps around 2 or 3 in the night, I really tried to relax my body, at least for a moment, making peace with the mosquitos who were incessantly buzzing around me and in my ear. I often talk about nurturing non-human relations, but I find it very hard to coexist peacefully with mosquitoes.
I was growing sleepy, however, and my mind and body were giving a little less resistance to all these things happening around me. I focused intently on the tree foliage above me. The moon, covered in dark grey pink clouds, was nowhere to be seen. The little hill was very dark, as it was so dense with trees. Up above from the Tufo, I could spot layers upon layers of maple leaves. I also spotted some Aspen. Somewhere around me, a bird was flitting about.
The wind rustled the leaves, and it was mesmerizing to look at them swaying about. I wanted to film them, took my camera out, but realized I had left with two almost empty batteries. I had enough time to film one minute before it died. Ok, so I wasn't meant to watch this through the camera lens, a friendly reminder. An unmediated experience.
I was cold and sleepy, and the mosquitos were still a bit too intimately close to my ears and body. But I focused on the leaves swaying again and slowly became warmer and more relaxed as I looked. The world around me grew more distant, and there were only leaves, the dark grey pink sky, and the movement.
At some point, my eyes started to drop a bit, squinting, and I saw something strange. The leaves had turned into a garden, it looked like. I opened my eyes fully to see the leaves now hanging entirely still as the wind had suddenly stopped and squinted them again to see if it was something I had really seen or if I was moving into a dreamlike state.
There it was again. When squinting my eyes, the leaves of the trees turned into topiaries, bushes and a grass field, some hedges and dark flowers. It appeared to me as a garden, like I was peering into a parallel place, something happening simultaneously alongside the leaves of the trees. The garden looked older, like something from the 1800s.
As I was lying there on the Tufo, looking up, it also felt like I was floating above this kind of secret garden, looking down from the sky. Hanging in thin air, above a place that felt like a place that exists, but I couldn't say when. I got extremely excited, and I think I felt grateful that the tree leaves had somehow opened up this little peek into some otherworldliness. I felt surprised that I would see something at all. The previous hours had been slow, non-eventful, besides mosquitos, eerie people in the bushes and cold hands and feet. I had given up on any kind of particular connection happening, considering going home to sleep and heat up. But there it was, something extraordinary and almost magical.
Every time I opened and then squinted my eyes again, there the garden was. I could access it quickly now.
I have in the past years read a lot about quantum theory and entangled particles. The idea of entangled particles (I hope I am explaining correctly) is that a pair of particles that make up atoms can be linked to each other. They can be close to each other and theoretically on opposites sides of the universe. The particles, two or a whole group, are connected so that when one moves, the other moves counter-clockwise. If one spins up, the other spins down.
Not all particles are entangled all the time. They might become entangled for a while and then let go. Scientists have entangled particles kilometres away from each other. Particles can also appear and disappear with no evidential pattern, and most of our universe is dark matter, things we cannot see, so maybe they disappear somewhere in there? We don't know. The theory also opens up the theoretical possibility of the existence of parallel or entangled universes: places with particles that are entangled with the particles that make us exist, moving counter-clockwise from ours, or just coexisting differently in this dark matter we cannot peer into.
There is so much unknown about dark matter and the quantum world, but say there are many universes. Let's say trees experience the world differently and 'see' other things than we do. For instance, there is a theory that some birds, including the European robin, can somehow see or hear quantum entanglement for split seconds to know where they are placed before they start to migrate. If that is true, the weave of the universe could be unravelled for them before their very eyes or perhaps played out for their ears.
We have very little knowledge of non-human experiences of the world because all our trials include our human perspectives and instruments, and their worlds can be so entirely different from ours that we fall short of understanding what that would actually entail.
Anyway, back to the garden. I guess it's some kind of mirage that I am looking at, but it really doesn't feel like it. It feels like a secret that I am being let into in the Utesita, in the full moon at Tøyen, peering in some sort of other beyond. It is still human, very much so, with the 1800s topiary. Perhaps I am watching time being circular or happening at the same time. At least at that moment, it seemed like something entirely else than everything I know could perhaps be a tiny bit possible.
Not scary really, it was calming.
I was dragged out of this curious experience by my body aching for warmth. I have low blood pressure and get cold very quickly if I sit still. Therefore, I had to move. I was getting picked up from the Ùtesita, and I asked to be picked up already, as I was back to being frightened by drunk people walking around the park and disappearing around me, making me feel unsafe. My partner picked me up, and we walked around the park for a longer time, up the small hill, up to its top overlooking Oslo city. We peered into a rambunctious allotment garden, walked through a traditional hay meadow, with lots of species rare in nowadays Norway, as we don't cut the grass with a scythe anymore. We passed an artwork that consisted of different flowers grown down a hill in the form of a ski slope, all white, glowing up under the night sky like tiny moons. We also met a very skinny cat.
I wanted to share the sounds I recorded from sitting at the Tufo, but by mistake, I have managed to only record the sounds of us walking up the hill and on our way back home.
So, what I share with you is this experience, the sounds of us walking back, a brief video of the leaves I was looking up at and the images of the park and Tufoen where I sat. Rest is up to the imagination.
Thank you so much, Line, Sissel, Maria, Guðbjörg and the rest of the full moon presenters, to make this moment possible for me.